We’re right on the verge of hitting 2011 (look out for our mammoth preview pieces next week), and one of the highest profile pictures in the early part of the year is Zack Snyder‘s passion project “Sucker Punch.” Warner Bros. are hoping that by giving one of their key directors (who is, after all, next set to tackle the crown jewel of “Superman“) a huge budget to indulge his own interests, they’ll be able to match the success they had with the same approach on Christopher Nolan‘s “Inception.”
The plot follows a young girl (Emily Browning) who’s committed by her abusive stepfather and has to team with the other patients to escape into a fantasy land full of Nazi zombies, dragons and giant robots in order to escape before she’s lobotomized. Movieweb has debuted three new images from the film, and they’re relatively restrained in that they show the cast not dressed as burlesque performers and not fighting 12-foot samurai, although we’re sure the film will skew more towards those kind of antics. Check the rest of the images out after the jump.
There’s also a report coming in from Bleeding Cool that bodes less well for the picture. The site has discovered a promotional poster for the BFI IMAX, the biggest large-format screen in the UK, that’s touting the 3D wares that they’ll be showing in the first few months of next year. Along with the glasses-requiring likes of “Tron: Legacy,” “Mars Needs Moms” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (although, strangely, not “Green Hornet,” which is receiving an IMAX 3D release), “Sucker Punch” is also listed, with a March release date.
This is curious, because, after an initial announcement of a 3D release, Snyder backtracked, telling MTV in May that “We’ve looked at a bunch of conversions, so whether or not we have the time to do it right — I’m not going to do it if we don’t have the time to really be meticulous with it… I don’t want to screw it up with bad 3D,” and later seemingly confirming that it wouldn’t be dimensionalized, saying “It’s in eye-numbing 2D, which is also awesome.”
So what’s happened here? Did Warners force Snyder’s hand or manage to convince him with a superior conversion process? Or did a BFI copywriter not get a memo at some point? With the March 25th release only a few months away, we figure that a bigger song and dance would be being made if a 3D release was being planned, so we suspect the latter somehow.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but the shine seems to have come off the 3D revolution in recent months, with the last-minute cancellation of the effect on “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1,” the frankly underwhelming use in “Tron: Legacy” and the inability to save “Gulliver’s Travels” from a spectacular box office demise. Having said that, 2011 will see more 3D releases than ever before, so it’s certainly not going away any time soon. 
